Louisiana’s Most Exciting New Politician

My poor friend The Mighty Favog is tortured by his home state of Louisiana. He loves it and he hates it and he just can’t quit it, even though he lives in the Midwest. We provide such entertainment for him about the human condition. Last night he brought me news of our state’s most dynamic and exciting municipal politician, Deedy Slaughter, the new mayor of the town of Port Allen, across the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge.

Slaughter was elected in November, and since then, she has brought a certain flair to city government. Some party poopers have filed a recall petition against her, because they just can’t handle her bold governing style. According to the Baton Rouge Advocate, the haters are all up in her business about:

Hiring her brother-in-law, Ralph Slaughter, for a nonpaid chief of staff position.

A running debate over whether she should have boosted her own salary by $20,000 a year to $84,960 annually.

Asking taxpayers to cover the cost of her $2,500 trip to Washington, D.C., to attend President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Now, the city attorney has resigned, and Mayor Slaughter, after having taken away the CFO’s ability to write checks, issued herself a direct deposit, in apparent violation of procedure, and maybe even the law. Whee!

Print reporting cannot bring you the full glory of Mayor Deedy Slaughter in action. Go to Favog’s blog for more. Follow Deedy before this glorious new political talent tragically flames out. Let this report from a Baton Rouge TV station (watch to the end) whet your appetite for her Ciceronian oratory, which includes the immortal phrase: “I been witch hunt since Day 1. I been fighting acquisitions after acquisitions.”

I do love my state, but sometimes I think the reason Louisiana exists is so the rest of America won’t have to feel so bad about itself.

Personally I commend her on her one witch fight to stop needless government spending and wish nothing but ill-will to any council that tries to keep her from complying with the statues and laws of the Lawrason Act.

You know when I went to grade school in Georgia, we were pretty low on the education list, we always pointed out that we were ranked higher than a few of southern cousins, Louisiana being on of them (don’t know if that is still the case)

So I guess that kinda confirms your thoughts. Though I will say one of my best friends now is from Baton Rouge (displaced with me here in northern Virginia) and he is proud as you can be about the state, he always speaks fondly of it. He has given me a really cool and interesting perspective about the place. At least I want to see it for myself rather than let it remain in that land of apathy.

Meh. There is garden-variety corruption, and then there is corruption stemming from the election of folks who, to put it undelicately, just don’t possess the admittedly limited intelligence necessary to hold an office. The first is injurious to the whole political system; the latter is an unfortunate consequence of democracy that is usually dealt with fairly easily while providing entertaining fodder for political blogs.

Here in Missouri we famously had a neophyte Secretary of State who was a bit more articulate than Deedy, but judging by her deeds while in office no more intelligent. She hired her son (if I remember correctly) when Missouri has an actual constitutional article prohibiting nepotism, and made similarly undefensible and actionable missteps. To its credit, the party of which she was a member cooperated quickly to put her tenure in office out of its misery without fanfare.

Just like the neo-cons prefer dysfunctional, broken Middle East countries because it reduces the projection of threat outside of their borders, I now prefer dysfunction and decay because it reduces the threat of the defense-security industrial complex within our borders (NSA, et al.) and outside our borders (attacking other countries whove do nothing to us and arming Al Qaeda in Syria). I now support the amnesty bill, the burgeoning welfare spending, et al.

Here in Pittsburgh, we believe that West Virginia was created so we don’t feel so bad about ourselves. I’m pretty sure Louisiana (or at least LSU) was created so some of us could feel bad about our local CFB teams. Ugh.

“My poor friend The Mighty Favog is tortured by his home state of Louisiana. He loves it and he hates it and he just can’t quit it, even though he lives in the Midwest. We provide such entertainment for him about the human condition.”

Ain’t that the damn truth?

I treasure my adopted Nebraska home and the people and culture that animate it, but dammit to hell, sometimes I do miss me some freak show. We Louisianians may be many things — some of them not particularly good things — but ain’t nobody ever acquired us of being boring.

Is Ms. Slaughter Port Allen’s first black mayor? I think her actions hurt the black community more than the white community because the latter are more likely to have the money to move if her policies cause the town to decline.

[NFR: No, there was at least one, shortly before her. He’s now in prison after a racketeering conviction. — RD]

I’m an admirer of what Huey Long said in his speeches. I’m also an admirer of the way he took on all the Plutocratic powers in Mississippi, the reason he was first impeached. I’m an admirer of the way he used new tax revenues on the oil industry to build roads into what was virtually a trackless wilderness. There are good reasons the older folk from the working classes revere him.

But, after reading a couple of detailed biographies, I have to admit we are blessed that his career was cut short when it was. I’m not sure why champions of the common people turn out to have infinite egos and the arrogance to run rough-shod over anyone who questions them, as Huey Long, Hugo Chavez, and Mao Zedong did. If we can solve that one, the way forward to the cooperative commonwealth would be a lot closer. (Oliver Cromwell doesn’t even make the list, because his response to the Levellers included “I was a gentleman born.”)

Here’s a nice bit of humor that opens up why Huey wasn’t reliable in the long run. He used to run around making stump speeches about how in his youth he would rise early Sunday morning to hitch up the mule to the wagon and take his Catholic grandparents to mass, then bring them home, then after giving the mules a break and feeding them, hitch them up to the wagon and take his Baptists grandparents to church. It was great campaign material for winning elections in Louisiana, but when a devoted acolyte said “Gosh Huey, I didn’t know that,” the Kingfish responded “Don’t be a fool. We didn’t even have a mule.”